The World is Flat (and Pigs with Lipstick Fly)

¡Hola! Everybody…
Today is my dear friend Jana’s birthday.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY SWEETIE

Hope everyone is well…

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-=[ When Pigs fly ]=-
“The media’s the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that’s power. Because they control the minds of the masses.”
-- Malcolm X

The myth of the liberal media bias was created decades ago but the lie has stuck. I will say that the only good thing from the past eight years of incompetence is the obvious fact that there is no liberal media bias. Actually, it is painfully obvious that the opposite is true.

There is a corporate media bias.

As a result of at least two decades of conservative effort, all mainstream media is now owned and controlled by a handful of corporations. You can go for days getting your news solely from Time Warner, for example. The fact remains they are corporations and serve moneyed interests. The truth of the media is that corporations run them.

They are also primarily owned by pro-republican companies.

For example, General Electric, who does millions of dollars worth of business with the Bush government, owns NBC.

Now if you want to make the argument that high-level corporate managers of the largest multinational corporations are engaging in a liberal plot, I would suggest a visit to your local mental health clinic.

::blank stare::

Recently, Sarah “Lipstick on a Pig” Palin was featured prominently in an unabashedly gushing report from the Wall Street Journal. Of course, you may have forgotten that Rupert Murdoch, who promptly fired all independent thinkers and replaced them with conservative cheerleaders, recently bought the WSJ.

This is the truth of the media – the truth packaged instead of reported.

One cannot have a cogent discussion of the state of the media without a discussion of the FOX effect. FOX has never been a news agency. It has been a propaganda arm of the Murdoch Conservative News Empire. Murdoch, an Australian billionaire is renowned for his conservative bent and desire to see it spread worldwide. Here in New York City, he subsidizes the New York Post, a paper that posts multi-million dollar losses every year simply to keep his twisted version of reality on the New York streets.

Now, everyone knows that FOX is a joke, and a poorly crafted one. There is no real news at FOX. Their silly catch phrases are easily seen as being designed to be the polar opposite of what they claim. They are not “fair and balanced”; they are unfair and imbalanced to the right. They never “report and let you decide”; they package their opinion as news and tried to tell you what to think. Their broadcasts are all right out of the GOP playbook. They frame obviously right-wing-nuts such as Bill O’Reilly as “moderates” or independents and give them prime-time news-opinion slots. Even the show that was supposed to present both sides is designed to give the right wing opinion far more weight. It’s like the wrestling matches of yesteryear: in one corner, you have the square-jawed and “hard hitting” Hannity as the right wing opinion and on the other, you have the poosie “liberal” guy in Colmes as the “left” opinion. You already know who the “bad” guy is and who’s going to “win.” In actuality, Colmes is anything but left – he’s a tepid moderate, if that. The strategy is to schedule extreme right-wingers as guests and match them up with moderates, pretending the moderates were left-wingers.

The result is that all of the coverage is heavily slanted to the right and the moderate voices began being framed as the left, all but eliminating true progressive opinion from the network. We all remember it was FOX that initially called Florida for George W. Bush, when they never should have. The other networks, fearing they were being “scooped,” followed suit.

Never mind that the analyst “calling” it for Bush was actually related to him and that every fair analysis since proves that Gore actually won Florida.

The FOX effect would has crept into other networks. Today, even formerly “fair” networks such as MSNBC copied the model. At one time, just a few years ago, the MSNBC prime time lineup included noted Republican spin-doctor Tucker Carlson and Joe Scarborough, a former republican Congressman -- both being offered as “independent.” Chris Matthews has always been a Bush apologist and was linked to Jack Abramoff as well. The result was palpable. The guests were all designed to copy the FOX model. Pat Buchanan was and still is a regular guest on all shows, despite the fact that he is as far right wing as humanly possible. Do you realize that Buchanan has gone on record as a Holocaust denier? He even gave mad props to Hitler in one of his books. Imagine Louis Farrakhan being touted as an “analyst” on prime time TV. Right! Won’t happen! Nevertheless, Buchanan is the white equivalent of Farrakhan.

John McCain and Palin can get away with almost anything because they know those that are in charge want him elected. Not the actual reporters covering the news but the people behind the decisions. The men behind the curtain. Who else can take a Katie Couric interview with John McCain, cut out an incorrect answer on foreign policy, and splice in stock footage and a sound bite? When caught, they wink and nod, say, “Mistakes were made.” In that way the corporate media pimps undermine democracy and make us the village idiots of the world. People still believe Saddam Hussein had something to do with 9/11 and what about those WMDs in Iraq? Vast swaths of ill-informed people have no clue regarding the science of evolution, and we had the spectacle of a majority of republican presidential candidates saying they didn’t “believe” in evolution. That’s like saying you don’t “believe” the world is round. SMDH

Love,

Eddie